Tommy's words:
My biggest problem when I started Junior High is that I wouldn't join their gangs. I didn't smoke or drink or steal things or do drugs so I didn't fit in. Most of my friends were adults because I had more in common with people who hunted, fished or played video games. At twelve, I didn't weigh much and I was short. I was an outsider in junior high.
We had to walk over a bridge that looked down on Conneaut Creek and the Bessemer and Lake Erie train tracks. My mother usually met me along the way home, because Aunt Diane lived over there.
This particular day, a bunch of older kids were heckling me. I hated going to school, because I knew they would be after me. They usually were. They were threatening to throw me over the bridge. Most of them were a lot bigger than me and I knew they could do it. Some of them were grabbing for me while others were kicking my backpack in to the pathway of the fast moving traffic. I couldn't get away from them.
Then I heard someone screaming and suddenly my mother was there yelling at them to leave her child alone. She snatched my backpack out of the road and led me into the road where the cars had to go around us. We hurried across the bridge ahead of the pack.
They caught up with us just after we got off the bridge. She must have totally surprised them. A kid about my size punched me about the same time a teenage girl grabbed my mother and started to rain blows on her. My mother had her hands full of my pack and a video she was returning. I couldn't help her because I was fighting off the boy who was trying to hit me.
Mother screamed for help from passing motorist, but no one would stop. She yelled for somebody to call a cop but none ever showed up. A siren sounded somewhere and the mob took off, but that wasn't the last of it. No cop cars came.
A few blocks farther on, we saw that the sirens were escorting a load of toxic waste down route twenty. We went on home. We told Dad and he told Mother to get me after school each day and take me to Aunt Diane's. We were to wait there an hour till the creeps were off after someone else.
The next day came and I stayed home from school. Mother got a call from a cop who said they wanted her to come down to the station and answer some questions. When Dad got home from work, he stayed with me while she went to the cop shop.
She said the minute she was in the door, a big guy grabber her arm and read her her rights. She thought no one would believe her because there was a whole gang of them to say she was making it up. She asked him if she was being arrested. He said, "No, if you were, you'd be in handcuffs!"
He took her to a room where he informed her the girl had told her parents that my mother had attacked her and they were pressing charges. This after he told her she wasn't being arrested!
Mother told him what happened. He asked if she could prove it, but it was only her word and mine if they listened, against all them. Then mother told him how she held up her arms to ward off the blows. She wouldn't hit back because my mother doesn't believe that violence solves anything.
The policeman called in a female officer and Mother had to take her blouse off. Her arms and chest were covered in bruises. They took photographs. The cop said the girl had no bruises on her. He told Mother not to worry. We wouldn't have to go to court.
Now, looking back, I think Mother should have pressed charges. We left about a month later for New York. Ohio had become a dangerous place to live.
My mother was our room mother every year. That means she made cookies, helped out with fund raisers and read stories to the younger classes. She chaperoned field trips and went to PTA meetings. One year she taught the fifth graders how to do a simple needlepoint Christmas project.
Every now and then they asked her to bring in her Native American stuff, she had a footlocker full of things including my medicine bag. She would give a talk about our history and things she had seen and done. In grade school they loved her.
By the time I got to Junior High, she was an embarrassment. When we moved to New York, I had to retrain her. She didn't mind. A lot had happened before we came out here that neither of us likes to talk about.
Mine again:
He said it all so much better and remembered things I had forgotten.
These photos above were taken by Tommy and I think the ones with him in them were taken by his teacher. I think we told her it was a secret but we weren't coming back.
The school buses in the snow. I'm not sure who took that one.
These next ones were taken when another class came into the little ones classes to show them how they had disected an animals eyeball. Gross right? I didn't take them.
